‘If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices’, states the poet Susan Howe in a remarkable mixed-genre essay that engages with, and interrogates, the politics of form (1990: 180). Entitled ‘Encloser’, the essay meditates on what it means to ‘enclose’, to ‘include’ and canonize texts, to label them ‘narratives of conversion’, say, when their affective charge explodes that cognitive label. Formal generic categories can enable reading, but impede meaning. ‘Poetry shelters other voices’ because it always exceeds its assigned place. It can suddenly erupt and disrupt the grand master narratives of history, the received critical interpretations and...

This chapter retraces the development of Edward Said’s position on Goethe, beginning withOrientalismbut then moving on to more recent texts which, partly for chronological reasons, have been considered less when Said and Goethe have been examined. More often than not, discussions focus on the defence of Goethe and argue that Said does not do justice to theWest-östlicher Divan[West–Eastern Divan] (see, in particular, Fink, 1982; Birus, 1992; Weber, 2001; Bosse, 2005; Kreutzer, 2005). Instead, the present study pays closer attention to the tensions and transformations in Said’s position while also reading Said’s treatment of Goethe as...

One of the trademarks of Edward Said’sOrientalism, arguably the foundational text of postcolonial studies, is Said’s willingness to crash through boundaries of genre and form. Early in the Introduction, he writes:

a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on. (Said, 2003a: 2)

Said’s own starting point, of course, is that many different sorts of writing...

As an international Guadeloupian female author, Maryse Condé negotiates the categories of writer, critic and academic with an acute awareness of the conditions of reception of her work. Although nominally a ‘Guadeloupian writer’, Conde’s reputation as ‘an important writer’ has largely been consolidated in the United States and in France where she has been awarded a number of literary prizes.¹ One of the distinguishing – and also critically overlooked – features of Condé’s work has been the significant number of interviews that she has given during this period in a variety of media in both the United States and France.²...

Thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson commented of genre criticism that, though ‘thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice [it] has in fact always entertained a privileged relationship with historical criticism’ (1981: 105). For Jameson, the potentially progressive political implications of this relationship derive primarily from his conviction that genre is, as his subtitle suggests, ‘a socially symbolic act’ (cf. Frow, 2005: 2, 10–19, 142–44). From this perspective, the task of genre criticism is not ‘neutrally to describe’ (Jameson, 1981: 107) the form in question but to understand it as constructing ‘a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex...

When, in 1999, Assia Djebar decided to publishCes voix qui m’assiegent,¹ she gathered under one cover the majority of her critical essays, pieces that had, until then, not been readily accessible. Some were in newspapers; some in reviews; some circulated by determined scholars from copies made of the writer’s own draft notes, notes misplaced after they had been delivered.Ces voixbecame the requisite document for which the Université de Montpellier awarded her a doctorate that same year, and the scholarly Canadian periodicalÉtudes françaises, a prize.

The compilation offered an ‘Avant-propos’, a Foreword, whose defiant first sentence sounded...

In 1956, Jacques Stephen Aléxis wrote that the ‘Western genres and organons bequeathed to us must be resolutely transformed in a national sense’ (1994: 197). He argued for an expansion of aesthetic form, which, while maintaining the importance of social realism, would accommodate the expression of the Haitian people. This transformation of genre by Haitian artists and writers was, argued Alexis, to be viewed as a ‘renovation’ and a ‘widening’ of ‘universal models’ that would allow for the articulation of nations beyond Europe.

This view of literary genres as synecdoche of the ‘national character’ is asserted differently by Edouard Glissant...

We all know the expression: how to speak to you about it – to talk to you about it: me, to you, aboutNedjma?

How to speak about the words – without stifling what Ponge calls ‘le tremblement de la certitude’?¹ Is that not, at the foundation, the very question of criticism?

How to speak about it: about ‘Nedjma’, the mystery of the feminine, good and bad ‘étoile’, a star [‘astre’] and a disaster, desired and thought of as evil, fantasized, invented by all the stories recounted, how to speak about it when one is Kateb Yacine, born in Constantine...

Prior to 1990, autobiographical forms of Francophone Caribbean literature had received scant critical attention. Although the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented period of literary fecundity in the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, this was largely expressed through poetry in the first half of the century, with a later shift towards prose and the novel discernible from the 1960s. A number of magazines, journals, essays and manifestos, many of which launched trenchant debates on literary movements, had also appeared with varying degrees of success and longevity. Such publications, however, tended to privilege the collective over the individual, articulating national rather...

In the turmoil of independence from colonial rule, the Algerian, Kateb Yacine, and the Martinican, Aimé Césaire, who were to become two of the major writers of post-World War Two Francophone literature, chose to write tragedies. Prior to this, the use of a tragic genre was the exclusive prerogative of European playwrights, thus this aesthetic gesture was completely new in the context of Francophone writing. As these authors were renowned for their commitment to political emancipation, the provocative nature of the choice to write a tragedy invites analysis. Kateb and Césaire were not the only Francophone playwrights to make this...

This essay sets out to investigate the implications for J. M. Coetzee’s poetics of his shift from an agonistic if in his case highly mediated settler tradition within South African writing, which is part of his literary and imaginative inheritance, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode of realist writing that came with his move to that country in the early 2000s. The larger question which this investigation will raise, by implication if not always directly, is how a shift of national location within the international republic of letters might impinge on a settler or colonial tradition within postcolonial poetics; or...

If the three underlying principles of the short story are those of delimiting, focusing and economizing (Gratton and Le Juez, 1994: 2), we may wish to add one more crucial dimension, to underline not its ‘lonely voice’ (Frank O’Connor saw the short story as written for the ‘individual, solitary, critical reader’ (1963: 14)) but its gregariousness, its ‘esprit vagabond’ [roaming spirit] (Chevrier, 1992: 7). It may be that the sociable and gregarious nature of the short story leads to an instability of meaning and interpretation, for which the short story plays a perfect role, but this is not to be...

Genocide is by nature generic, both in its definition and in its execution. The crime of genocide, as outlined in the 1948 United Nations Convention, concerns the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. Such an ambition, to destroy a whole people, is not fulfilled overnight. Instead, the genocides of the twentieth century in Armenia, the Nazi death camps, the Balkans and beyond, have taught us that such violence commonly involves planning, public communication, administration and sustained action. For the international community to respond, and for the perpetrators to be prosecuted in...